Concerned about N9 availability in your country?
nokia.com used to have a number of online stores, which sold devices direct to consumers. Nokia also has a "notify me of availability" page for the N9 which misses out a number of prominent countries like the US, UK, France and so on. However, Marcus Wikström points out this is almost certainly for Nokia's online shops: The availability list on the web is for the Nokia online shop. Nokia UK online shop (and others) closes June 30 so that's why it's not listed there. It's not a list of all countries it will be released in. Play.com and Expansys, two reputable online UK electronics vendors, also have it available for pre-order. From the hardware side, the device supports penta-band 3G (including T-Mobile and AT&T in the US). Given the likely cost of that support, it seems unlikely Nokia would ship the device with it if they weren't planning to ship the device to those countries.
Future Harmattan release may have homescreen folders
Urho Konttori, who has been locked inside Nokia for many months working on Harmattan and the N9, has emerged blinking into the light and answered a number of questions on the forums and IRC. Regarding the ability to categorise your applications on the N9's home screen he says: foldering support is coming in update release. We are working on it.
N9 Camera in-depth
Nokia's Conversations blog has more details on the N9's camera, including how you take - and focus - pictures without a dedicated camera key: With an 8-megapixel camera, Carl Zeiss lens and autofocus, the Nokia N9 has the hardware to take great photos and videos when out-and-about. We know that the camera capabilities of our phones are always of keen interest to Conversations readers and thought it would be a good idea to tell you more about how taking a photo works, and what you can do with it afterwards. There are a range of "in-depth" articles on conversations.nokia.com, including covering the range of accessories that were announced and the navigation capabilities.
N9 has hardware for FM receiver & transmitter, but no software
According to a post by Quim Gil, the N9 has built-in FM transmitter and receiver functionality: Someone asked about FM radio. Hartti already answered but let me confirm that from a pure hardware description point of view there is both FM RX and TX inside. The N9 feature's TI's WL1271 wireless chipset, which includes support for FM RX and TX. Although the N900 shipped with built-in FM transmitter functionality, it did not include a radio application. The N9 will be similar: the community will just have to come to the rescue again.
Nokia N9 can have instant app close gesture, enabled in settings
Nokia's gesture-based UI interactions leave a lot of options open for quickly controlling applications and tasks. Evidently the N9 will ship with at least some of these potential features in the form of an instant app-close gesture: the swipe is from up to bottom -- the other swipe just puts application into a recents view. Felipe (now famous for his arguing with Elop) wrote a patch and me and Urho drove it through the management at last. Congratulations to Urho and Felipe on persisting and getting it not only as configuration option but also in Settings UI. According to Urho Konttori, much of the touch interaction in the Swipe UI is defined in the .theme files. This will potentially leave a lot of room for relatively low-entry customization.
Major progress on N900 cell broadcast SMSes
Jonathan Wilson has succeeded in receiving information which is broadcast from cell towers, typically advertising the cell tower ID or location: The reason Cell Broadcast SMS is broken on the N900 is that there is a bug in libsms, specifically it is incorrectly dealing with the size field of the SMS packet being sent from the cell modem firmware. As Nokia are unlikely to fix the bug (at least in Fremantle libsms, its fixed in Harmattan libsms), publish source code for libsms or publish the information required to produce a replacement for libsms that doesn't require rewriting or replacing half the system, I have found a way to patch the binary of libsms to fix the bug. Developers who are interested on hacking on this, and exposing them to the user, should get involved in the two threads with Jonathan and Joerg Reisenweber.